Wayne Madsen believes Derbyshire can hold their heads up high after defeat in the quarter-finals of this year’s NatWest T20 Blast.

The Falcons were knocked out of the competition this week by a Hampshire side who went run-crazy at the 3aaa County Ground with a place at Finals Day on offer.

But Madsen was keen to look at the positives from their 2017 white ball campaign, which saw eight T20 wins and a second place finish in the North Group.

He said: “It’s probably been our best season ever, we had eight wins out of 14 games which is pretty consistent in this form of the game and we had some very big wins.

“We’ve been excellent at home for the most part and we can be proud of how we played our cricket this year in T20.

“A big positive we can take from the season is how we performed consistently throughout, and other than this last game, we haven’t had any big defeats against us, so that has been very encouraging and is something we can certainly take forward into next season.”

Derbyshire lost to Hampshire by 101 runs thanks largely to an incredible display of batting from Shahid Afridi, who hit 101 as his team made 249-8, and 3-25 from Kyle Abbott.

“It’s a disappointing way to end but when someone plays like that, in this game anything can happen and anyone can have their day and he played brilliantly this evening,” said Madsen.

“It was too much in the end, I think somewhere near 200 could have been a bit more realistic and losing wickets at the start set us back and we weren’t able to recover.”

On his dropped catch off Afridi he said: “I saw it all the way, I thought it was coming straight in to be fair, I probably catch those 98 times out of a hundred but it bounced straight out.”

Madsen was his county’s stand out performer in the competition; scoring four half centuries and becoming the first Derbyshire batsman to score 500 runs in a T20 season.

He also took 13 wickets at a rate of 7.36. And added: “Hopefully this will be a building block for years to come and regular quarter-finals and beyond.”